Movie notes: ‘Virginity Hit’ a hall-of-fame bomb

With an unorthodox marketing campaign focusing on word of mouth and social media, the low-budget teen sex comedy “The Virginity Hit” hoped to duplicate the succes of last year’s underground hit, “Paranormal Activity.”

Instead, the film wound up with a distinction it didn’t want — one of the all-time box-office bombs.

Opening on 700 screens nationwide Friday, the film earned an estimated, beyond-paltry $300,000 over the weekend. That’s good enough — make that bad enough — for the No. 4 slot on the Worst Wide Openings chart at industry tracker BoxOfiffceMojo.com.

Only “The Proud American” (2008), “The Passion Recut” (2005) and last fall’s “Transylmania” earned less opening weekend. (For the record, a “wide opening” is defined as 600 screens or more nationwide). And those three had scant publicity.

And its per-screen average of $429 means that, at any given screening, there were maybe 4-5 people in the theater. In comparison, “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” earned an estimated $5,330 per screen last weekend, and that was considered just so-so.

The planned platforming of this film is an oddity: it will see select theaters in a few Heartland cities beginning the 10th of September, first only showing at select times (9:30 p.m. for example) and then expanding the next week to another few cities, and the next week to another handful; the social media marketing push for this title seems built for a slow build and numbers should be strong.

Oops. At least, about that “strong” part.

The oddball promotion plan also featured “Still a virgin?’ billboards in select markets. In San Antonio, the film had a confusing debut, opening Sept. 17-19 at the Palladium, with only a few screenings a night. It expanded to six multiplexes last Friday. It probably didn’t help that radio ads ran all last week, even though there was no theater showing the film last Monday through Thursday.

The goal appeared to have been to build a buzz similar to “Paranormal Activity,” last year’s word-of-mouth supernatural thriller that had a limited rollout fueled by a savvy online promotional campaign. It was telling, however, that “Virginity Hit” distributor Sony didn’t report box-office receipts from the two weekend of limited release.